February 21, 2018Deborah Klugman – LA Weekly “Think of the prose poem as the box, perhaps the lunch box dad brought home at night,” writes down-to-earth poet Louis Jenkins in the program notes to Nice Fish, a unique (and to my mind brilliant) collaborative work by Jenkins and renowned performer Mark Rylance. Read more… Now running throughRead More

February 21, 2018Lovell Estell III — Stage Raw New York City’s trip. theatre ensemble brings their off-beat sex and romance saga to L.A., after a lengthy run in Chicago. Read more… Now running through March 17

February 20, 2018Ellen Dostal – Musicals in LA 3-D Theatricals recreates a pivotal moment in rock and roll history in their latest production, Million Dollar Quartet. It’s the date (December 4, 1956) four legendary musicians – Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley, and Johnny Cash – would all end up at Sun Records in Memphis on theRead More

February 20, 2018Ellen Dostal – Broadway World By the time Shakespeare gets to the last of his history plays concerning the Wars of the Roses*, HENRY V, the party boy who would be king has become a man. Gone are the indiscretions of youth seen in the earlier HENRY IV plays, which follow young Prince Hal onRead More

February 17, 2018Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw According to Lee Blessing’s 1987 A Walk in the Woods, the world’s problems might be resolved if only individuals were able to ignore their myopic and belligerent governments and approach each other with humor, patience and respect. Read more… Now running through March 18

February 17, 2018Chelsea Sutton Harker Jones – Edge on the Net By all accounts, sculptor Louise Nevelson was a real character with a larger-than-life persona and an existence to match. She was ahead of her time in terms of feminism, sexual liberation and her take on art. Unfortunately, Edward Albee’s play chronicling her trajectory arrives in itsRead More

February 14, 2018Neal Weaver – Stage Raw I have to admit that I’m confused. I don’t know why playwright David Sessions calls his play Two Fisted Love, and labels it a dark comedy. The comedy is in short supply, and most of the love seems to be in the past tense, or essentially destructive. Read more… NowRead More

Archive for Neal Weaver – Page 2

Playwright Tania Wisbar is the daughter of a German father and a Jewish mother, both of whom were prominent members of the German film world in the 1930s. But when she was just six months old, her parents divorced, and she and her mother fled German to escape the growing Nazi threat.Read more…

German playwright Wolfram Lotz’s play (translated by Daniel Brunet) is a zany satire on racism, racial stereotyping, and colonial attitudes in a supposedly post-colonial world. A farcical version of Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, via Apocalypse Now, it follows German Sergeant Oliver Pellner on a secret mission into the heart of Afghanistan, accompanied by his faithful aide, Stefan Dorsch (Ashley Steed).Read more…

Absence Makes the Heart… — written by Abley, and directed by Chrisanne Blankenship-Billings — is a modern take on Hans Christian Anderson’s The Red Shoes, which deals with a dancer driven to her death by the uncontrollable urge to dance.

This powerful drama by Alessandro Camon delves into the minds of two extraordinarily isolated people: a convict serving a life sentence for a murder he committed as a juvenile, and the mother of a police officer whose only son was shot and killed in the line of duty.Read more…

Neal Weaver – Stage Raw

Playwright Alessandro Camon, an Oscar nominee for his screenplay for The Messenger, is deeply interested in the soul-destroying practice of solitary confinement, and in the experiences of crime survivors — people who lost loved ones to murder. He deals powerfully with both issues in this two-person play.Read more…

This play by Deborah Lawlor, co-founder of the Fountain Theatre, is perhaps a fictionalized personal memoir. It’s about Freddy Herko, a gifted young dancer and pianist, whose talent blazed in New York City’s avant-garde scene in the 1960s, only to be snuffed out by drug addiction. Herko died when he leapt naked from a fifth-floor window when he was only 28. Read more…

The Upstairs Lounge was a lively and popular New Orleans gay bar till 1973, when an arsonist doused the stairs leading to the club with lighter fluid, set it aflame, and then rang the doorbell. In the ensuing blaze, 32 people were killed — mocked and ridiculed even in death, and refused burial by local churches because of their sexuality.Read more…

Rob Stevens – Haines His Way

In an America divided more bitterly every day along racial, gender and sexual orientation lines, in an America where the President says that Nazis and White Supremacists are “fine people,” hate crimes and senseless acts of violence keep escalating.Read more…

Jeremy J. Kamps’ play “Runaway Home,” now premiering at the Fountain Theatre, is set in New Orleans’ Lower 9th Ward three years after Hurricane Katrina. The waters may have long receded, but the residents still wander like ghosts through the wreckage of their lives.Read more…

Neal Weaver – Stage Raw

Two years after Hurricane Katrina, playwright Jeremy J. Kamps went to New Orleans as a volunteer, “gutting and mucking” waterlogged, mold-ridden and decaying houses. He was able to observe firsthand the endless problems that plagued local residents in their efforts to rebuild and restore their destroyed communities: government assistance that came too late or not at all, displaced people unable to find lost friends and relatives, racism, red-tape and sometimes deliberate obstruction.

Directed by Shirley Jo Finney, Jeremy J. Camps ‘ Runaway Home takes place in New Orleans in 2008 and revolves around a troubled 14-year-old runaway learning to survive on her own after a physical altercation with her mother prompts her to leave home.

Playwright Simon Stephens (Heisenberg, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) deconstructs Bizet’s opera Carmen in an attempt to illuminate contemporary issues of loneliness, isolation and all-around anomie.

As Trish Harnetiaux’s “Welcome to the White Room” began, in its west coast premiere production at Theatre of NOTE in Hollywood, my first reaction was to think of Jean Paul Sartre’s “No Exit”: three people are placed in a room without any real understanding of what they are to do there.Read more…

John Patrick Shanaley is practically unique among American playwrights in that although he has consistently hewed to a distinctly personal vision and style, he has achieved impressive commercial success as a screenwriter (Moonstruck, Doubt) and a director (Doubt).Read more…

Roger Bean, who wrote and directed the hit musical The Marvelous Wonderettes and its various sequels, has done it again. He’s written another juke-box musical — but here the emphasis is on country and western songs.Read more…

Rob Stevens – Haines His Way

Bets Malone and Misty Cotton are two of the Southland’s best known and most talented musical theatre performers. They have known each other since they were children growing up in Northern San Diego County…Read more…

We have all heard horrendous tales of the hardships and uncertainties facing the undocumented struggling to cope with our fractured immigration system, but that knowledge is pretty abstract compared to the grueling realities of being there. Actor/writer/poet Alex Alpharaoh has been there, for thirty-odd maddening and painful years, and he shares the reality of that experience with gut-wrenching passion.Read more…

Deborah Klugman – Capital & Main

Like millions of other undocumented people, writer/performer Alex Alpharaoh was a child when he arrived in the United States. Read more…